Emily Busch, Nippon Kan Vice President serves as guide for the cultural tours.
Thousands of children in the Denver school system have come to Nippon Kan for this cultural tour program, beginning way before Japan House Culture Center changed its name to Nippon Kan Culture Center.
Nippon Kan first began as Japan House Culture Center in 1978 as a Japanese culture center offering classes in tea ceremony, flower arranging, Japanese language, brush calligraphy and Aikido. All of the instructors at that time were volunteers from Japan who all lived and worked together at the foundling center. Classes were taught at night, and by day, staff traveled by invitation to Denver public schools to give on-site cultural demonstrations. These cultural demonstrations were also used as a vehicle to promote the Japanese martial art of Aikido which was relatively unknown in the area at that time.
The demonstrations were performed at no charge, so to support the volunteer programs, staff worked at night cleaning buildings with a local janitorial company. Working by night and performing demonstrations and teaching classes by day, the original Japan House volunteer staff got little in the way of rest. Right-hand man to Homma Kancho during those formative days was Yutaka Kikuchi whose talents and efforts went a long way toward the success of Japan House. It was so busy during those early days, that the stress caused Yutaka’s hair to fall out in quarter size clumps!
There were many volunteers and friends back in those days (too many to mention everyone) that helped lay the ground work for what has become Nippon Kan and many have gone on to become responsible members of the Denver professional community. Instrumental in Nippon Kan’s early development were Yumiko Asano (Japanese language teacher, currently director of the Kumon Math School in Denver) and Kumiko Shimizu (kado-flowering arranging instructor, currently senior Japanese language instructor and coordinator at Colorado University and Principal of the Denver Japanese School).
Reflecting back now, I had no idea that so many members of our staff would become so established and successful! You could see in them, then as now, the talents and dedication within. More of this story can be read in Homma Kancho’s new article “Beginning Times of Nippon Kan”
Today Nippon Kan Headquarters has its own 10,000 square foot facility that exhibits traditional Japanese architecture and artifacts in our dojo, museum, gardens and restaurant. About 3000 school children a year come to visit Nippon Kan on these Japanese cultural tours The tours include hands-on activities like origami, Aikido demonstrations, facility, museum and garden tour and a Japanese lunch provided by Domo. The cost for the tour is $10.00, $7.00 of which is donated to AHAN for use in world-wide humanitarian activities. During the tour children learn about AHAN projects here at home and all over the world especially about how their participation in the cultural tour assists in the rice donation projects for children in orphanages in Bangladesh and Myanmar.
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- Children watch as uchideshi demonstrate the art of Aikido.
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- Homma Kancho writes all of the children’s names in kanji as a memento of the tour.
Tours are sometimes for high school students too.
LINK HERE to a slide show of AHAN and Domo rice donation projects for spring 2009
Nippon Kan is still run by volunteers to this day, and this school field trip program is made possible by volunteer staff that take time off of work and school to run this program. This past April, we were visited by a group of students from Ellis Elementary which turned out to be a very special group of students from a very special school. Ellis Elementary is unique to Denver in that its student population of about 600 children comes from over 18 different countries. Ellis Elementary has taken on this challenge in a very positive way and encourages all of its students to learn and share in their international cultural backgrounds. This was one of our most favorite field trips this year as Ellis Elementary turned out to have very wonderful students, teachers and parents. They in turn were very excited and supportive of Nippon Kan’s cultural programs and we expect to see them again next year!
Written by
Emily Busch
AHAN International Program Director